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I've been doing a lot of woodwork, and after finishing building a vertical fin from scratch, I decided to tackle the seats as a break from more critical stuff.
Up until this point, every bit of wood I've cut has replaced a piece that was broken, rotted, warped or missing, but when I stripped the rather unfortunate blue Naugahyde from the front seat bottom I realized that it was basically sound. I could have fixed a loose corner block or two, and it would have kept my butt from resting on the keel quite handily, but...
I would have had to pull a hundred staples from the recent upholstery, fill three hundred holes from all of the past and present staples, strip the old glue and foam remnants off, scrape loose paint, sand the whole works and then varnish it again. Far easier to start over and the results will be nicer.
At this point, and if you've read this far, you're wondering, 'what IS the point?' I began to question which was the morally correct choice. Do I preserve this one visible bit of the airplane's past, even though it'll look like the south end of a northbound dog? Do I replace it, to make it match the rest of the new work and, not least, because that is the easier course?
The airplane in question is not, in and of itself, historically significant. The seat isn't from Shangri-La, with Gentile's pucker prints. It's not a panel with a field flak repair. No one fought it died in it. In fact, I can't find a record of any active military service before it was surplussed off. Most of the previous butts in this seat were corporate aero-club members that flew it before it was pranged and unceremoniously abandoned.
So questions are:
What, if any, obligation do we have to preservation?
When preservation and restoration clash, what is the proper course?
Probably no 'right' answer to these, and they just lead to many more questions.
To follow up from here, the back seat was broken badly enough to warrant complete replacement, so the front seat will be replaced as well.
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Lest Hero-worship raise it's head and cloud our vision, remember that World War II was fought and won by the same sort of twenty-something punks we wouldn't let our daughters date.
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